Friday, February 19, 2010

Sindy is no pushover when it comes to 10-man raiding (gear). She is very much a dps race and awareness test for your entire raid. The following is the strategy that worked best for us, and earned our first kill.

Makeup:

1 MT (we used a prot warrior with frost resist gear)

1 OT (recommended; feral druids work best as they are uncrittable in dps gear)

3 healers

5 DPS

The MT will be tanking for the majority of the fight. In cases of higher gear levels, you can probably get away with no offtanks (by burning her quickly), but for progression attempts for 10-strict guilds I do recommend going with an offtank. Now, to maximize DPS, this offtank really works best as a cat-spec feral druid: they are inherently uncrittable (defense capped) by talents and gain a chunk of health with bearform, and have both barkskin and survival instincts (if specced). This offtank will only be taking Sindy for 10-20 seconds at a time.

The first 65% may make you feel like you can get away with two healers. While this is accurate for that first 65%, phase 3 (starting at 35%) will take up half of the fight length and will require 3 healers: one healer will always have the unchained magic debuff, and if another gets iceblocked (which is very likely), then you will be down two healers until that block is broken.

The Pull:

Now, this is very, very important. Sindragosa will aggro immediately after you kill Rimefang, and as she arrives, she will block off the ramps and upper platform at the top of the stairs. Any players caught up there will be out of LoS and unable to contribute to the fight. Do not stand at the top of the stairs when Sindragosa aggros!

Below is the way we (generally) arranged ourselves for phase 1: tanking her facing away from the raid, with melee arranged along her side and ranged clustering together within aoe heal range and heal range of the tank, but out of the front cone of her breaths. She has a decently sized hit box.

Abilities

Besides the usual "cleave, tail whip" dragon abilities, Sindragosa has a raid-wide frost damage aura, as well as these other tricks:

Casters:

Unchained Magic: this debuff will always cast on one magical dps, and one healer. If you have no magical dps, then it will just cast on one healer. Whenever a player has this debuff, any spell they cast (including heals) will stack Instability on them. When the Instability stack falls off, it will deal magical damage to that player. 6-7 stacks is fine for P1/P2; in P3, I recommend reducing that by at least one for every stack of Mystic Buffet you have on you (since that increases the damage you will take).

Physical/Tanks:

Frost Breath: cone breath attack, slows the tank. We had our tank wearing frost resist gear (the crafted stuff) for this reason. If you are not the tank, you need to avoid standing in her front cone, even if you are out of cleave range!

Chilled to the Bone: where casters have instability, this is what physical dps get stacking on them. It has a chance to stack on each melee attack. 3-4 stacks is fine; once you get up to 5-6 stacks, however, pull back and hold off on attacks until your stacks drop.

All:

Icy Grip: Sindragosa will pull the whole raid (and sometimes the totems too) on top of her. IMMEDIATELY run away from her. If you're lagging, have a holy priest cast the speed-bubble on you (if specced!) or some sort of life-saving buff! Otherwise her Blistering Cold attack will one-shot you. You have 5 seconds to get more than 25 yards away from her. RUN.

She will use these abilities throughout both P1 (100-35% while grounded) and P3 (35-0%).

Phase 2:

At 85% health (and every 1:50 afterwards) Sindy will fly up into the air and cast Frost Beacon (good debuff to add to your raid frames) on two random targets. At this point, your raid will want to run to a predetermined location (we chose the corner by the stairs) and gather up. The two players who are marked with frost beacon need to spread out nearby (more than 10 yards away from others): healers should pump the beaconed players full of HoTs and then, when the beacon wears off, the two marked players will become ice tombed.

Sindy will begin firing explosive frost bombs around the room: she will cast four of them before landing again. Everyone will need to use the ice tombs to LoS the explosions. DPS down the frost tombs a little bit at a time as she sends down the bombs; after the fourth bomb goes off, break the tombs and run back in to repeat Phase 1. If you take too long to break an ice tomb, the player inside will begin to suffocate.

Important: you need to LoS the bombs, NOT Sindragosa herself. There will be little blue frost runes on the floor marking where her next bomb will land. This is what you need to LoS.

Use bloodlust/heroism if available right after she lands from an air phase. You will want to push her past 35% before she enters a 4th air phase, due to the enrage timer. Remember, the last 35% of this fight will take as long or longer than the rest of it, and you want to push through the early phases as quickly as possible.

Phase 3:

At 35% health, Sindy stops hopping into the air, but she will begin casting ice tombs (via frost beacons) one by one on the raid and pulse out mystic buffet on everyone in LoS of her. You will use the ice tombs to drop your mystic buffet stacks as often as possible.

The key to ice tomb positioning is keeping them close enough to the tank for healers to be able to LoS the buffet, but still be able to see the tank to heal them. Your raid will use these ice tombs to drop their mystic buffet stacks via LoS.

If your MT is using frost resist gear, they will want to drop their own mystic buffet stacks after about 9-11 stacks (assuming their OT isn't in an ice tomb). Coordinate a swap after a frost breath to limit the likelihood of the OT needing to tank through a frost breath of their own. Equipping the OT with frost protection pots will help in a pinch, if you are using a dps-geared feral druid. Our OT was getting 4 stacks at most. If you are using a warrior, they can use intervene to quickly rush themselves to an ice tomb to drop their stacks, or use it to get back to the offtank. When the tanks are swapping, avoid having both tanks standing together in the same frost breath.

This phase is all about controlling yourselves, as a raid.

Melee should focus on killing ice tombs, as it gives them plenty of opportunity to drop their own stacks without gaining stacks of Chilled to the Bone (from attacking Sindy herself). We had our three melee, including the OT, focus entirely on killing these blocks. One of the melee took charge on vent to coordinate ice tombs: which to kill, when, and to verbally alert who had the next beacon. If any players looked to be standing too close to the next beaconed player, he'd also call out warning.

Ranged DPS should try to drop their mystic buffet stacks behind every other ice tomb, while spending the rest of the time killing Sindragosa. It is very important that they pay attention to their instability and mystic buffet stacks, as they can easily kill themselves in this phase.

Healers should try their best to keep the tanks and raid alive around ice tombs and instability. Do your best to LoS the mystic buffet at all times without loosing LoS on the tank. If you have unchained magic, limit how many stacks of instability you gain with your mystic buffet stacks, as it is very easy to kill yourself.

Position your ice tombs carefully, and stay away from players who have frost beacon. Chaining ice tombs can easily wipe your raid. If you do chain an extra ice tomb or two, direct your ranged dps to quickly kill the extra tomb(s) before returning to what they were doing before.

We did have a few attempts where we did everything perfectly, but came up against the enrage timer. It is for this reason that we used a dps-spec offtank, since she was able to pour out full DPS when she wasn't tanking, and a frost-resist maintank, since he could take far more stacks in P3 than he could without it.